How the Beauty of Flowers Connects Us to Nature and the Divine

The abundance of nature left us florastruck.

Spring is happening in the neighborhood here by the beach. The daffodils are blooming earlier than ever this year, and the robins are everywhere.

How is it that all of this beauty was hidden and unseen one week yet manifested in all its glory the next?

Nature has a way of playing hide-and-seek, but you must tune in to participate. As the great masters and sages have taught us, the divine is nature, and nature is the divine.

My daughters, granddaughter, two dear friends, and I visited the Philadelphia Flower Show yesterday. The smell at the entrance was heavenly. Beauty was at every turn. I hope you don’t mind if I depart from the regular newsletter format and use this issue to highlight nature through my photos.

This year’s Philadelphia Flower Show theme was

FLORASTRUCK

[flohr-uh struhk]

/adj./ stunned and amazed by floral beauty

What a great word! Maybe the images will invoke this feeling within you.

"Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are." Rumi

"The divine is not something high above us. It is in heaven, it is in earth, it is inside us." Morihei Ueshiba

"Nature is the art of God." Dante Alighieri

"Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Luke 12:27

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." Lao Tzu

"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour." -William Blake

Don’t you worry, spring is coming! Thanks for reading.

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